'Truthers' Still Don't Buy How Towers Came Down

Out On The Streets, They Hope To Raise Doubts About Official Version

"How they could have collapsed so suddenly... controlled demolition."… (Patrick Raycraft, THE HARTFORD…)

September 09, 2011|Rick Green

On the sidewalk in front of Superior Court in Hartford, Wayne Coste makes his pitch, like a preacher looking for one convert at a time.

"Can I give you some information about 9/11 that you probably don't know about?" Coste politely asks a man toting a thick briefcase, ushering him over to a laptop screen showing a video clip of the horrific pancake collapse of the World Trade Center buildings.

Coste, an electrical engineer who brings his battery-operated road show, banners and videos to libraries, street fairs and city sidewalks around the state, is one those who see everything differently, a decade after the Sept 11 attacks. He is part of a small army of professionals who refuse to accept the 9/11 orthodoxy.

"Highly energetic incendiaries, which have many of the properties of explosives, were involved in the destruction of the three World Trade Center high rises on 9/11,'' Coste announces to a small handful, including me, gathered in front of the courthouse Thursday morning.

"Courageous volunteers who believe in freedom of speech as an important founding principle of our nation are stepping up to open the way for honest discussion of what happened on 9/11," says Coste, who is 57. He wears an American flag tie.

Coste is one of 1,600 or so licensed professionals who have signed on to the Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a California based-group that believes the trade center buildings were brought down by "controlled demolition." Among a panoply of 9/11 groups with an assortment of agendas, these truthers say they are about science, not conspiracy.

The "controlled demolition" theory is difficult for a journalist to swallow — how did thousands of tons of explosives get into the buildings without detection? What's to be gained by anonymously murdering 3,000 Americans? How is it that no suspects have ever turned up in a decade of investigations and media coverage?

Hundreds of researchers spent years on the National Institute of Standards and Technology report that concluded there was nothing to support the architects and engineers' case. Extremely hot fires, fueled by jet fuel, weakened the steel skeleton of the trade center buildings, initiating a total collapse.

The official story, according to the NIST investigation, is that for each tower "a different combination of impact damage and heat-weakened structural components contributed to the abrupt structural collapse. … NIST found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by control demolition using explosives."

For Dale Webb, a mechanical engineer who until recently lived in New Hartford, this official story has "so many unanswered technical questions that people were glossing over."

"What really gets me is what came out more recently, the explosive substance found in the dust of the trade center, thermite. It gets absolutely no play in the press. … It's like a taboo subject. The glaring fact is that a steel building has never collapsed before in a similar circumstance."

Another member, Vinnie Rossi, an electrical engineer from Durham, told me this isn't another collection of conspiracy theorists: "We are conducting an engineering analysis. We are using science and all the evidence available."

When we met at a pub in Simsbury one night recently, Coste brought thick loose-leaf binders and a laptop loaded with video of the collapse of World Trade Center buildings 1, 2 and 7. I watch a mesmerizing string of buildings collapsing as Coste explains his group's cause, something he says he spends as much as 20 hours a week on.

"Finding this stuff in the dust, the unexploded thermite, it's like finding an unlit match after the forest fire,'' Coste tells me. "One of the things that's hard to dismiss is 1,500 architects and engineers saying that there is a problem. At the very minimum, the official story is wrong.''

What do I think, Coste asks. The pancake collapse of the trade center buildings does look a lot like "a controlled demolition." The truth is, I'm not even close to joining his cause.

But there is something about putting your professional credibility on the line that's intriguing about Coste's group, which was founded by a San Francisco architect five years ago. This weekend, they will screen a daylong series of films at the University of Hartford that question official explanations of 9/11.

Back at the Hartford courthouse, I watch as Coste has found a passer-by who seems interested.

"Something is not right with this story,'' he explains, drawing the man closer to the video screen, where the North Tower keeps making its tragic collapse, again and again.